The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures

Starred review from February 21, 2022
Was the man who invented cinematography kidnapped and murdered on the orders of Thomas Edison? Film producer Fischer (A Kim Jong-Il Production) raises that possibility in this fascinating portrait of 19th-century polymath Louis Le Prince. Though Edison and the Lumière brothers are widely credited with inventing movies, Le Prince beat them to the punch. In October 1888, after “four years of furious, costly work,” he filmed members of his family on their lawn in Leeds, England, using a 40-pound camera with a hand crank, then projected the “animated photographs” on his workshop wall. Two years after his breakthrough, however, Le Prince boarded a train to Paris after visiting his brother in Dijon and was never seen again. In the seven years it took before he could be legally declared dead and his family gained control of his intellectual property, Edison, a relentless self-promoter, made a fortune showing moving pictures on his Kinetoscope device. After a series of court rulings upheld Edison’s patent claims, Le Prince’s widow accused the Wizard of Menlo Park of having her husband killed; more recently, film scholars have contended that Le Prince died by suicide. Fischer points the finger at another culprit while admitting that the case may never be solved. Vivid character sketches, lyrical descriptions of the art and science of moviemaking, and a dramatic plot twist make this a must-read.

March 1, 2022

Fischer (A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power) brackets the story of French artist and inventor Louis Le Prince--and his undeniable yet overlooked role in film history--with true crime trappings. Working in his studio in 1880, Le Prince dropped two photographic plates and noticed the blurring of the images created the illusion of movement; within the decade he had a working motion-picture camera and projector prototype, as well as a collection of the world's first live-action motion pictures. Then he boarded a Paris-bound train in Dijon on his way to join his family in New York, where his motion pictures would have their debut. But after boarding the train in Dijon, Le Prince was never heard from again. Fischer presents Thomas Edison as a sinister figure singularly interested in Le Prince's disappearance--a bit of misdirection, as Fischer has a more likely suspect in mind--but the sensational end of Le Prince's life remains unsolved. Fischer's book also successfully chronicles the history of photography and explores how moving pictures were the next logical step--and how several inventors were in competition to get there first. VERDICT Fischer combines firsthand accounts with dynamic writing to bring the Victorian era to life. A remarkable cast of characters (including Le Prince's equally fascinating wife, Lizzie) makes for compelling reading.--Terry Bosky

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Starred review from February 15, 2022
The story of a pioneer in motion-picture making and his mysterious disappearance. In this combination of "a ghost story, a family saga, and an unsolved mystery," Fischer, an author and film producer, introduces us to relatively obscure 19th-century artist and inventor Louis Le Prince, a Frenchman whose career prompted him to relocate to England and the U.S. Fascinated by photography and the manipulation of recorded images, Le Prince made extraordinary advancements in cinematography and is now credited by some historians, including Fischer, as having created the first true motion pictures in the late 1880s. His suspicious disappearance in 1890, shortly before he was to unveil his revolutionary single-lens camera, allowed rival inventions to supersede his invention. This meant that other innovators, such as the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumi�re, and Thomas Edison, the so-called "Wizard of Menlo Park," got credit as the most important trailblazers in the field. Fischer's sketch of the historical context in which Le Prince worked--"at the end of a century when humankind had already domesticated space, light, and time"--is consistently entertaining and illuminating. The author vividly renders the personalities and science involved in the production of early cinema, and he lucidly explains the complex technological challenges and breakthroughs. Particularly insightful are Fischer's interpretations of the likely motivations of Le Prince and his assistants as they attempted, under frequent financial duress, to complete a workable prototype of their camera and secure international patent protections. Also intriguing is the book's contribution to the ongoing demythologization of cultural icon Edison, who seems to have routinely schemed his way into taking credit for the work of others. Though Fischer's ultimate conclusion about the circumstances behind Le Prince's death remains speculative, he offers and defends a plausible version of events that draws persuasively on extant historical evidence. A fascinating, informative, skillfully articulated narrative of one of the forgotten figures in cinematic history.

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